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Skahr - Heartland of the Ionic Empire

My first local map from my world map project.

I started with an area in the center of the continent, so no coastline at all! The scale is still waaaaay too big if I go through with what I have in mind. This is supposed to be the size of maybe 2/3 France, but it would be about 860 miles wide by what I originally thought of. Well, need to adjust that.

I changed the mountains a bit from my previous tryouts.

Here's a first peek, not that much there, but the mountainrange was an a***hole piece of work!

In the end I'm planning to add a little coloring, but for now I'll lay it out in black and white.

I added a part of a low mountain range called The Fenning to the west. Tried out coloring and so far and for now I'm quite pleased with it, though the mountains stand out too much for my taste. There'll also be a lot to redo on the eastern mountain range.

Nice work so far! I can imagine how long it took to do those mountains! I personally find rendering mountains from directly above the most taxing.
Starting with mountains isn't always a bad idea though as they can be used to determine where rivers come from and if one side gets a lot of rain while the other does not. The mountains are understood as mountains though having black lines along the ridges for me at least is a little conflicting visually. I would experiment a little with different styles of mountain shapes which black lines can fight against. Like it might be hard to express a large dome like mountain as it would have no obvious place to put a black line. The black lines almost feel like they could be canyons or rivers. You do definitely have the right idea with making the tops of the mountains lighter than the bottom of them though!
It depends on the level of detail you want with rivers but remember water would build up in those mountains in the top right and form lakes and rivers flowing out. Unless that is the region receives very minimal rainfall. There are a number of tutorials on rivers and mountains around here.
Keep up the good work.

I like your forests a lot, it's a really cool style. Mountains look good too. There's an inconsistency though: the trees are seen from the side, and the mountains from above. Also, the trees are very sharp, while the mountains are fuzzy. To me, these elements don't really match each other. As Viking says, removing the black lines could improve it, but I'd also suggest giving the mountains more, sharper detail and try to lower the perspective to make them fit together with the forests.

I get the confusion about the black lines on the mountainridges. I'm not sure yet of how to tackle that problem. If I remove them, as you suggested, it will look completely blurry (I'm not home right now so I can't show you). Maybe I should remove the grey shadow layers and just work with lines. That could take care of the trees not matching problem, too.

Thanks for the compliment on the forest! Figuring out that style took a few days.

This looks good for a newcomer! I'm not a mapper myself, so I doubt I could even do what you've done. I think it looks nice, I'd love to see it finished About the black lines, you could blur them to make them blend into the mountains more?

I found that once you get your head around Photoshop, it's actually easier than one might think. Still takes a lot of work and endurance, but it's worth the effort!

About blurring the black lines: this would still be confusing, since ridges are usually the brightest, not darkest part of a mountain. Also, blurring would take away the little sharpness that is there. But thanks for your thoughts!

Maybe try making the black lines white instead then? If they are on their own layer, you can invert the colors of it, otherwise selecting them with the wand tool and filling the selection with white should work too.

Update

Long time no see.

After long thoughts and much fiddling around I decided to ditch the mountainstyle in favor of the forest to solve the perspective problem. Still a lot to improve on them, but here's a look at what I have been doing:

On the whole map (zoomed out) it looks like this:

I think the perspective on the mountains is still not quite right. Maybe there's also too much detail in them.

I'd be happy about any suggestions on how to change that side-view of the mountains to something more isometric.